The Visionary Queen: Justice, Reform, and the Labyrinth in Marguerite de Navarre

By Theresa Brock

The Visionary Queen affirms Marguerite de Navarre’s status not only as a political figure, author, or proponent of nonschismatic reform but also as a visionary. In her life and writings, the queen of Navarre dissected the injustices that her society and its institutions perpetuated against women. We also see evidence that she used her literary texts, especially the Heptaméron, as an exploratory space in which to generate a creative vision for institutional reform. The Heptaméron’s approach to reform emerges from statistical analysis of the text’s seventy-two tales, which reveals new insights into trends within the work, including the different categories of wrongdoing by male, institutional representatives from the Church and aristocracy, as well as the varying responses to injustice that characters in the tales employ as they pursue reform. Throughout its chapters, The Visionary Queen foregrounds the trope of the labyrinth, a potent symbol in early modern Europe that encapsulated both the fallen world and redemption, two themes that underlie Marguerite's project of reform.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781644533093

Book preview

Cover: The Visionary Queen, JUSTICE, REFORM, AND THE LABYRINTH IN MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE by Theresa Brock

The Visionary Queen

EARLY MODERN FEMINISMS

Series Editor

Robin Runia, Xavier University of Louisiana

Editorial Advisory Board

Jennifer Airey, University of Tulsa; Paula Backscheider, Auburn University; Susan Carlile, California State University; Karen Gevirtz, Seton Hall University; Mona Narain, Texas Christian University; Carmen Nocentelli, University of New Mexico; Jodi Wyett, Xavier University

Showcasing distinctly feminist ideological commitments and/or methodological approaches, and tracing literary and cultural expressions of feminist thought, Early Modern Feminisms seeks to publish innovative readings of women’s lives and work, as well as of gendered experience, from the years 1500–1800. In addition to highlighting examinations of women’s literature and history, this series aims to provide scholars an opportunity to emphasize new approaches to the study of gender and sexuality with respect to material culture, science, and art, as well as politics and race. Thus, monographs and edited collections that are interdisciplinary and/or transnational in nature are particularly welcome.

Series Titles

Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist, by Lissa Paul

The Circuit of Apollo: Eighteenth-Century Women’s Tributes to Women, edited by Laura L. Runge and Jessica Cook

The Visionary Queen

JUSTICE, REFORM, AND THE LABYRINTH IN MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE

THERESA BROCK

NEWARK

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brock, Theresa, author.

Title: The visionary queen : justice, reform, and the labyrinth in Marguerite de Navarre / Theresa Brock.

Description: Newark : University of Delaware Press, [2024] | Series: Early modern feminisms | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023014646 | ISBN 9781644533086 (paperback) | ISBN 9781644533277 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781644533093 (epub) | ISBN 9781644533109 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Marguerite, Queen, consort of Henry II, King of Navarre, 1492–1549. Heptaméron. | Marguerite, Queen, consort of Henry II, King of Navarre, 1492–1549—Criticism and interpretation. | Labyrinths in literature. | Justice in literature. | Reformation in literature. | Short stories, French—History and criticism. | French literature—16th century—History and criticism. | Reformation—France.

Classification: LCC PQ1631.H4 B75 2024 | DDC 843/.3—dc23/eng/20230601

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014646

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2024 by Theresa Brock

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact University of Delaware Press, 200A Morris Library, 181 S. College Ave., Newark, DE 19717. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor University of Delaware Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Marguerite de Navarre: The Visionary Queen

Part I

Labyrinthine Motifs in Marguerite’s Era, Endeavors, and Spiritual Outlook

1. The Labyrinth as Structure and Symbol: From Experience to Writing in the Medieval and Early Modern Contexts

2. From the Labyrinth, a Vision: Competing Influences on Marguerite’s Religious, Political, and Creative Endeavors

3. We Walk by Faith, Not by Sight: Exegesis, Pilgrimage, and Labyrinthine Connections in the Reformation

Part II

The Heptaméron as Textual Labyrinth

4. Into the Labyrinth: Mirroring Sin, Prompting Reform

5. Down Tortuous Paths: Exploring Approaches to Justice and Reform

6. Above the Labyrinth: A Higher Vision for Reforming the Self and Society

Conclusion. The Empirical Reader at Labyrinth’s End: Responding to Marguerite’s Vision

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Unlike the typical, solitary labyrinth walker, I have benefited from the company and the wisdom of a great many people while following the path of this project. Many thanks go to the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, where I completed my doctoral studies and where the earliest iterations of this research took shape. I am particularly grateful to Jean-Claude Vuillemin, Bénédicte Monicat, and Christine Clark-Evans, as well as Tom Beebee in Comparative Literature, for their astute comments and encouragement, both during my PhD years and in the intervening period in which this project has evolved and unfolded. I would also like to thank Heather McCoy for her support of my professional development over this same period. I am grateful to the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State for the formation it provided in modern-day feminist causes and in historical approaches to the works of women writers. A special thank-you also goes to Kit Hume, whose generosity and sage advice over the years, on matters editorial and professional, have proved invaluable to this project.

The Visionary Queen likewise derives inspiration from my time at Williams College, where colleagues and students alike sparked insights that led to a new vision for my research. I am grateful to the Department of Romance Languages, and especially to the French program, for the opportunity to develop new courses in early modern studies and to engage with the creative and highly perceptive students who call Williams home. Many thanks to Brian Martin, Kashia Pieprzak, and Sophie Saint-Just for their mentorship within French; thanks also to Jennifer French, who lent support to the formation of a research group that nourished this study. I am indebted to Pramila Kolekar and Michele Monserrati who, as part of the research group, provided important feedback on a draft of chapter 3. I also extend my gratitude to the Department of French Studies at Smith College, where I now work and where colleagues have expressed warm support for this project. I look forward to many convivial conversations in the years ahead.

This book would not exist if not for the support of Julia Oestreich and Robin Runia at the University of Delaware Press; their commitment to women writers and early modern studies breathed fresh inspiration into the project. Thank you also to the many staff members in editing and marketing whose behind-the-scenes work made the book a reality. I am likewise very thankful to my anonymous reviewers at the University of Delaware Press, whose collegiality and discernment have greatly improved this study.

Women in French Studies has generously agreed to grant permission to reprint material from volume 26 (2018), as an article I published there provides inspiration for parts of chapter 6.

Finally, I want to thank my spouse, Carl Cornell, for his enthusiastic support of my research over many years, from first steps to a winding path and now to this particular labyrinth’s end. I am forever grateful to walk life’s labyrinth with such a generous and insightful companion.

Introduction

Marguerite de Navarre

The Visionary Queen

Centuries ago, in the 1500s, a woman sat pondering in the wee hours of the night. Alone in her library, she contemplated relics against a backdrop of blue wall hangings, whose rich color represented both the Virgin Mary and the kings of France, one of whom was now her own brother.¹ Her seven-volume Bible featured prominently on her bookshelves and offered her solace in the face of the many problems and responsibilities to which her piles of correspondence attested.² Her brother’s reign and policies, her family members’ fluctuating health, her desire for spiritual truth, her fight for institutional justice—such troubles filled her thoughts, even in the tranquil atmosphere of the library. In this place of preoccupation and contemplation, nature motifs such as fountains alluded to the garden on the castle grounds while also conveying a desire for calm and inspiration.³ A love of creativity likewise led this woman to acquire literary works from Italian writers.⁴ Yet alongside such pleasant items, an herbal encyclopedia detailing antidotes to poisons served as a constant reminder that the life of the mind and of the spirit could not be divorced from the dangers of politics.⁵ The woman who sat pondering among these books, papers, and symbolic objects was Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549).⁶

If, as biographer Pierre Jourda has asserted, the queen of Navarre felt fully herself at her château in Nérac,⁷ where this library was located, it may have been because the three key components of her life and works—politics, religion, and creative endeavor—came together there. Marguerite lived in a moment of religious and institutional turmoil that also witnessed significant developments in the arts. Her brother would later become known as France’s Renaissance king due to the flourishing of Italian-inspired literature, art, and architecture under his reign. Yet despite her brother’s association with new trends and ideas, the figures of authority in Marguerite’s early life, such as her mother, Louise de Savoie, were products of the Middle Ages. As Marguerite entered adulthood in the early sixteenth century, she therefore encountered great paradigm shifts and societal upheavals. From Martin Luther’s 95 Theses (1517) onward, the Reformation called into question aspects of the Catholic Church’s teaching and practices, with particular attention paid to the roles of ritual and exegesis in Christian life, as well as criticisms over the power dynamics inherent to Church hierarchy and systems of absolution. New forms of faith emerged in the years that followed, some of which favored non-schismatic, internal Church reform and others of which advocated separation. Although Luther would eventually espouse a schismatic model of reform, along with his French-speaking counterpart John Calvin, Marguerite de Navarre held onto hope that the Church could be purified from within.

Indeed, the queen of Navarre was a key figure in a non-schismatic but reform-minded group of Catholics known as les évangéliques. This group sought, in response to Luther’s critiques, to promote greater access to the scriptures in the vernacular, printing numerous religious texts and commentaries. They also valued faith and exegesis above ritual and viewed Christian education as a crucial form of charity.⁸ To promote spiritual instruction, they placed sympathetic preachers in influential positions, thanks in large part to Marguerite’s proximity to the king as well as to the Concordat of Bologna (1516), which had granted extended authority to François Ier (1494–1547) over the Church within France.⁹ Moreover, the évangéliques believed in a hands-on approach to reform. Individual Catholic orders were reformed under their watch. Marguerite took a keen interest in this cause, initiating and overseeing the reform of several orders herself, even writing to the pope about expelling unscrupulous religious leaders and replacing them with more upright individuals.¹⁰ As an évangélique, Marguerite adopted an active stance on faith that was intertwined with the project of reform, a project that sought to foster justice in institutions and, as a consequence, in society writ large. Ultimately, in Marguerite we find a biblically oriented and engaged Catholic who viewed reform as a stepping stone to a better and more just society, one in which those in positions of power would harness their influence to succor the poor, the vulnerable, and the innocent.

As this brief overview suggests, the queen of Navarre lived and wrote at the intersection of institutions. Her gender, among other aspects of her identity, influenced her perception of, and involvement in, both the Church and the aristocracy. As such, it is important to examine the confluence of several factors in Marguerite’s life experience, including gender, class, and religion, that intersected within her identity as a devoutly Christian noblewoman.¹¹ On the one hand, as sister to the king, she had considerable class-based privilege and political influence. On the other hand, her status as a woman limited the extent to which she could exercise power overtly and independently, especially given Salic law, which forbade women from ruling in France. Still, the regencies of Marguerite’s mother and of her forebear, Blanche de Castille, pushed the limits of women’s political power in France and gave the sense that rules could be bent under the right forms of pressure.¹² Marguerite therefore proceeded strategically, building religious and political networks composed mostly of men in order to further her vision for institutional reform and greater justice in society. Whether she had her brother’s ear or collaborated with the bishop of Meaux, Marguerite found creative ways to work around the limitations that her society imposed on women.

This was true not only of her real-world endeavors but also of her literary texts. When the second edition of her controversial poem Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse was published in 1533, Marguerite narrowly avoided being labeled a heretic by the Sorbonne theology faculty, a fate that her brother forestalled.¹³ Even in the realm of the written word, then, Marguerite sought out strategic workarounds, couching political and spiritual reflections in lighthearted formats that seemed less threatening to men in positions of power and that drew inspiration from respected male authors. Because Marguerite de Navarre adopted such strategies, her vision and her endeavor for reform have yet to be fully appreciated. Bringing the visionary thrust of the queen’s life and works to the fore is this book’s aim.

In uncovering Marguerite’s status as a visionary, this study contributes to ongoing efforts to rehabilitate the queen of Navarre’s political agency, all while shifting the focus of that discussion. Elizabeth Chesney Zegura’s book on Marguerite de Navarre’s gaze provides important reflections on the queen’s political endeavors, highlighting how the motif of sight in the Heptaméron gestures toward Marguerite’s awareness of societal injustice.¹⁴ Zegura’s treatment of gender, class, and politics builds on Barbara Stephenson’s analysis of the queen’s correspondence and leveraging of political influence.¹⁵ Carla Freccero’s many articles and book chapters on women and governance in Marguerite’s writings likewise recover her understanding of the gendered power dynamics encoded within aristocratic hierarchies.¹⁶

All of these analyses contribute critical components to a politically oriented portrait of Marguerite. They foreground the queen’s political activities, and as such, her religious faith comes to occupy the background. The Visionary Queen adopts a slightly different approach, bringing the queen of Navarre’s political agenda into direct conversation with her faith and putting the two on equal footing. It does so out of the conviction that we can most fully comprehend the queen of Navarre’s political role and her significance to early modern Europe and to our own times when we examine the intertwining of the two major institutions in which she participated. After all, in a society in which the Church confirmed the power of monarchs and in which kings were said to answer to God, there was no separation of church and state. Any action undertaken to alter the structure or practices of the Church would, by necessity, influence the government and vice versa.

In today’s Western societies, which are far more secular than those in Marguerite’s time, feminisms of various kinds have often distanced themselves from formal religion, especially surrounding such questions as birth control, abortion, and familial hierarchies.¹⁷ Religion and politics may thus seem like a difficult pairing to some modern-day feminists.¹⁸ Yet in the queen of Navarre’s case, religious engagement opened up new avenues for personal fulfillment and the betterment of society. For this reason, in Marguerite’s writings, Christian faith and the empowerment of women are often interrelated. As such, treating religion and politics together enables us to fully appreciate the scope of her contribution, which I argue is far more creative and encompassing, far more visionary than we have previously realized.

Because Marguerite’s visionary qualities become clearest when her faith and her sociopolitical endeavors are examined in tandem,¹⁹ The Visionary Queen brings together two critical currents on the queen of Navarre: the previously mentioned political vein developed by Zegura, Freccero, and Stephenson and the rebirth of studies on Marguerite’s religion, featuring insights into her crucial role among the évangéliques in her life and fictional works as well as her outlook on material goods. In this second vein, one finds such scholars as Jonathan Reid, Nicolas Le Cadet, Carol Thysell, and Catharine Randall.²⁰ To bring these approaches together while also highlighting Marguerite’s visionary life and writing, the present volume puts her into dialogue with her male contemporaries who wrote on religious and political topics to show how her own approach to reform differed from, or dovetailed with, theirs.

In the domain of Church reform, Marguerite’s writings consider similar topics as those of Erasmus (1466–1536), Luther (1483–1546), Calvin (1509–1564), her mentor, Guillaume Briçonnet (1472–1534), and one of Briçonnet’s key sources of inspiration, Augustine (354–430). On politics and its overlap with gender, Marguerite’s Heptaméron revisits genres and themes found in the works of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) and Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), all while calling out the abuses of the aristocracy, especially of aristocratic men. However, her works also treat topics related to the writings of Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), who discussed women’s education and state assistance for the poor. When one considers the ways in which the queen of Navarre’s life and earlier writings and especially her most mature text, the Heptaméron, enter into a larger discussion in which well-known male figures participated, a revised image of Marguerite emerges, one in which she is not merely a supporter of male authority figures in the Church and monarchy but a visionary and a key player in reform efforts.

In order to perceive the visionary nature of Marguerite’s work, it is helpful to consider what gender and genre theorist Christine Planté calls the conventional versus exceptional binary, which has at times shaped feminist approaches to women’s literature and history of earlier eras. According to Planté, this binary is reductionist since all women live and write from within patriarchy. Some are more aware of patriarchal influences than others and are therefore more overtly resistant, but no individual exists entirely outside of the patriarchal order.²¹ By observing how various attitudes toward women and their lives converge in the writings of female authors, we can gain a more holistic image of their experiences and of the numerous ideologies they may have encountered within the patriarchal structures of their times.

In the same vein, we can draw attention to the contributions of women from earlier eras by considering not only their writings but also their life stories and the sociocultural contexts in which they wrote. This information can enrich our appreciation for women’s literary texts when incorporated into attentive examinations of both form and content.²² Of course, we cannot access with certainty the precise intentions of any deceased author, nor does textual interpretation depend on the author’s intentions even if they were knowable.²³ The reader’s thought process should certainly enter into dialogue with the text’s content and form.

However, readers may end up inadvertently downplaying the significance of women’s accomplishments if they base the entirety of their analyses on their modern-day concepts and life experiences.²⁴ Zegura therefore argues for a careful balance between reader and text and between text and historical context, contending that Marguerite was a woman who engaged in ‘social criticism,’ which loses a portion of its experiential edge, and is diminished, when studied outside the context of her (gendered) life and times.²⁵ Placing literary texts in the context of a female author’s lived experience does not, in this approach, entail an extreme limiting of interpretation in which the modern day is absent from consideration. Neither does such an approach suggest that only one reading, based fully on biography, is possible or desirable when examining an author’s work with sociohistorical frameworks in mind. Instead, the stance that Zegura elaborates and that The Visionary Queen also adopts is one in which knowledge of a woman writer’s life and historical moment informs our understanding of her creative output and enables us to identify rich new connections that might not otherwise have been possible.

This conversation between the present and the past on the topic of gender and women’s writings finds echoes in Freccero’s concept of the early/modern, which fosters cross-temporal dialogues that, if approached in a spirit of balance, can act as fruitful alternatives to purely anachronistic reading. This approach encourages a back-and-forth across time, as symbolized by the slash between the terms early and modern.²⁶ Through an early/modern approach to reading texts from the past and considering the lives of their authors, we can contemplate our own realities while also respecting the temporal and cultural difference that others’ experiences represent. Instead of imposing our own standards of what constitutes theory or feminism on earlier writings in any strict or narrow way, we can ask how an author’s thought proved helpful toward women in their day and what their ideas can say to us as we work through complex twenty-first-century problems.

An early/modern approach works particularly well in the case of Marguerite de Navarre, as she lived through a tumultuous era, staring down large-scale societal problems and seeking to leverage her influence for reform and thus for justice. When we talk about these endeavors, however, we need to understand that the term justice, for example, did not carry all of the same connotations in Marguerite’s time as would arise in later centuries. Justice did not necessarily imply the overthrow of institutions, the elimination of social class, or radical changes to the structure of society, given the ideologies of Marguerite’s day, such as the divine right of kings and the Church’s confirmation of monarchical power. The Visionary Queen does not, therefore, propose an extreme reading of Marguerite in which she would constitute an iconoclastic figure that we might now term a radical. Rather, her concern for justice occurs within the context of her society and historical moment, which was a moment marked by reform. Within that context, her engagement is innovative, visionary, and worthy of modern attention, including for its pro-woman orientation and the resonances between her life and writings and our own concerns today.

Indeed, Marguerite’s writing can be read as an exploratory space in which to develop a vision for reforming institutions and fostering justice, two objectives she pursued in her real-world engagement. To highlight the visionary work in which the queen of Navarre’s writings can be said to engage, The Visionary Queen examines the symbol of the labyrinth, a built structure and polysemous concept in Marguerite’s society that represented spiritual ideals and earthly realities, process and product, difficulty and reward. The labyrinth’s ability to subsume apparent opposites within a larger coherent structure will prove crucial to understanding the visionary nature of the queen of Navarre’s political, religious, and literary contributions.

I. Key Terms: Justice, Reform, Visionary, Labyrinth

While the terms justice, reform, visionary, and labyrinth will receive additional attention in the chapters that follow, a brief overview will help orient readers and clarify differences between modern-day and early modern usage. Robert Estienne’s 1549 French-Latin dictionary offers insights into how Marguerite and her contemporaries would have understood such terms. In his initial entry line for justice, Estienne provides the Latin term justitia,²⁷ which translates in modern English to justice or equity.²⁸ Subsequent entries provide greater clarity through common phrases that contain the word justice, including punir, ou faire bonne justice des malfaicteurs (to punish or bring evildoers to justice), la justice criminelle (criminal justice), le gouvernement & superintendence de toute la justice (the direction and superintendence of justice), and reformer la justice (reforming justice).²⁹ Such expressions lend a strong judicial flavor to the word justice in the French of Marguerite’s era, while also implying government, oversight, authority, and the need for reform.

By contrast, some common meanings of justice in modern English, according to Merriam-Webster, include the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments, the quality of being just, impartial, or fair, and conformity to truth, fact, or reason.³⁰ Although such definitions allude to both the judicial system and governance, more broadly, justice as a modern concept implies both moral ideals and administrative concerns. What we can take away from this cross-temporal comparison is a common understanding of justice as both practical and moral, with the pragmatic questions of governance appearing to weigh a bit more heavily in Marguerite’s context. These two meanings would have been familiar to Marguerite not only due to her involvement in government but also through her study of scripture, which foregrounds justice both as a practical matter (notably, in Old Testament law) and as a moral one (e.g., in Jesus’s treatment of the poor, sinners, and Gentiles, which models mercy as a component of a righteous attitude toward others).³¹ Balancing the two ideals would have been a central concern for an individual such as Marguerite, who operated in governmental and religious circles simultaneously.

Yet another concept with implications for both governance and religion in the queen of Navarre’s era, marked by the Reformation, is that of reform. Estienne’s dictionary provides an entry for the verb form reformer, as opposed to the noun. He offers the Latin definitions reformare (to reform) and vertere in meliorem statum (to change into a better state),³² which suggest a process of reshaping and improvement. Other entries include the nouns reformation, reformations, and reformateur, which imply the unfolding process of the verb reformer as well as the agent that enacts this process. All of these entries cast reform as an active endeavor, one that requires power and agency.

In modern English, an active stance is also present, with Merriam-Webster foregrounding definitions of reform as a verb. A few examples include to put or change into an improved form or condition, to amend or improve by change of form or removal of faults or abuses, to induce or cause to abandon evil ways, and to become changed for the better. As a noun, reform is defined as amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved and removal or correction of errors or of an abuse or a wrong.³³ These modern-day definitions of reform underscore the themes of morality, correction, and justice. Reform, then, intersects with justice as part of a larger process of transformation in both our own times and the sixteenth century.

Another key term that enters into dialogue with justice and reform in this book is visionary. What does it mean to call someone a visionary, and how might our comprehension of that term differ from that of earlier eras? For modern readers, a visionary is someone having or marked by foresight and imagination.³⁴ However, there are numerous other possible definitions in the present day, such as one whose ideas or projects are impractical and one who sees visions. A fourth definition brings the term into closer contact with the root word vision: of, relating to, or characterized by visions or the power of vision. Still, this gesture is not as helpful as one might hope since the word vision also has multiple meanings, from the act or power of seeing to something seen in a dream, trance, or ecstasy to a thought, concept, or object formed by the imagination to the act or power of imagination.³⁵ When we consider definitions of both vision and visionary, we discover tensions between abstract and literal understandings. Which of these are in play in The Visionary Queen and why?

Interrogating how earlier eras challenge our assumptions regarding the faculty of sight, compared to the conjuring up of images in the mind, proves helpful to establishing relevant meanings. Looking back at Marguerite de Navarre’s life and works,³⁶ we see that multiple notions of vision—some literal, some figurative—inform the relationship between human realities and spiritual ideals. The Heptaméron, for instance, is littered with sights of ugliness and injustice and features frequent allusions to seeing, as Zegura demonstrates.³⁷ At the same time, in many works by Marguerite, we see a more creative model of vision. In Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (1533) and La Navire (published posthumously in 1896), Marguerite depicts mystical, dreamlike visions in which she mourns departed loved ones, such as her young niece Charlotte and her brother, François Ier. She uses these literary texts as a space in which to imagine what insights her niece and brother might offer from an eternal perspective, especially when it comes to living as a Christian in the world.

A spiritually oriented sense of vision likewise figures in La Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan (1548), which analyzes varying approaches to Christian faith in Marguerite’s lifetime, from orthodox Catholicism with its many rituals, to a biblically centered religious practice, to a mystical experience of the divine, with this last tendency embodied by an enraptured shepherdess in the play. In Mont-de-Marsan, mystical vision combines with the notion of imagination that we more commonly associate with the term visionary today since the text shows the need for creative thinking and the envisioning of new possibilities for the Church’s role in society.³⁸ Questions of leadership and of far-reaching, imaginative vision coexist with acknowledgments of sin and suffering in these and many of Marguerite’s writings. Considering just a few examples, we can infer that for Marguerite de Navarre, the term vision